Mr Pfeifer escaped from wartime Hungary and fought in Israel’s 1948 War of Independence before returning to his native Austria
January 9, 2023 16:19
ByLiam Hoare, in Vienna
Veteran campaigning Austrian Jewish journalist and Holocaust survivor Karl Pfeifer has died at the age of 94.
Mr Pfeifer escaped from wartime Hungary and fought in Israel’s 1948 War of Independence before returning to his native Austria where he became a leading campaigner against fascism and antisemitism.
President of the Austrian parliament Wolfgang Sobotka described him as a “tenacious fighter for democracy and against anti-Jewish hatred”.
He was buried last Sunday in the Jewish cemetery in Baden bei Wien, the town in which he was born in 1928.
At the age of 10, following the annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany, Mr Pfeifer fled with his parents to Hungary, where he joined the socialist Zionist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair.
In January 1943, he was part of a party of 50 children who made it out of Hungary, finding refuge on a kibbutz in Mandatory Palestine. He enlisted in the Palmach, the Haganah’s elite fighting force, in 1946 and was wounded in combat in 1948.
He returned to Austria in 1951, but told Austria’s communists he could not join a party that venerated Stalin. When asked how it felt to be back, he recalled replying: “The Nazis here are far too loud for my taste.”
He remained a steadfast Zionist who nonetheless criticised Israel’s new right-wing government as “cheats and criminals”.
As a journalist — notably as editor of the Jewish community of Vienna’s magazine Gemeinde in the 1980s and 1990s — he fought antisemitism in all its guises, whether far-left, far-right, or Islamist, though some of his fieriest confrontations were with Austria’s Freedom Party (FPÖ).
In a case that made it all the way to the European Court of Human Rights, Mr Pfeifer successfully sued the far-right magazine Zur Zeit after FPÖ ideologue Andreas Mölzer had accused Mr Pfeifer of being part of a campaign that had driven the political scientist Werner Pfeifenberger to suicide. In 1995, Mr Pfeifer had reported on Mr Pfeifenberger’s writings in the FPÖ’s annual yearbook, describing them as having “Nazi tones”.
Mr Pfeifer wrote and reported in multiple languages. He covered the plight of the opposition in Hungary under communism, an act for which he was deported multiple times during the 1980s. He was later a vocal critic of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán.
In the final decades of his life, Mr Pfeifer became involved the preservation of Holocaust memory. In addition to writing a memoir and participating in a movie about his life, he talked in schools about his experiences as a survivor.
Last year, he was one of four survivors — including Britain’s Lily Ebert — to receive the Simon Wiesenthal Prize’s main award for civic engagement against antisemitism and for education about the Holocaust from the Austrian parliament.